Article
Revisiting the South Station Hoard
Carlee A. Bradburya with K a r i e E d w a r d s a , C o u r t n e y L e e We i d a b , D e b r a L u s t i g c , Katie Sickmand and Leslie Kinge a
Department of Art, Radford University, Radford, VA, USA. Department of Art and Art History, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, USA. c History of Art Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada. d West Virginia Hospital Network, VA, USA. e College of Visual and Performing Arts, Radford University, Radford, VA, USA. b
Abstract Begun in 2012, the South Station Hoard is a collaborative effort to imagine, construct, and document a speculative treasure trove left by tween girls. In this essay, I introduce our project, the collaboration it inspired between my artist colleagues and myself (an Art Historian), and the directions it has taken since its initial presentation at the BABEL 2012 conference in Boston, MA. One aim of this essay is to be a safe repository (or even a sort of hoard) for us to store the memories of our collaboration. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 421–430. doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0002-6
The South Station Hoard is a collaborative effort, begun in the spring of 2012, to imagine, construct, and document a fictional treasure trove. Throughout its development, the project has become both increasingly ambitious and increasingly personal. In this essay, I introduce our project, the collaboration it inspired between my artist colleagues and myself, and the directions it has taken since its initial presentation at the BABEL conference in Boston on a cloudy Saturday morning in September of 2012. I include recollections and reflections from my collaborators. One aim of this essay is to be a safe repository (or even a sort of hoard) for us to squirrel away the memories of our collaboration.
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The South Station Hoard is an arts research project that compares the Staffordshire Hoard with an imagined hoard deposited by present-day preadolescent girls. We constructed a subterranean installation, generated speculative historical documents, collected and embellished social networking ‘artifacts,’ and photographed the entire process. In addition to confronting the hoard’s supposed signification of warrior culture (both heroic and antiheroic forms), we addressed contemporary issues relating to gender, bullying, adolescent development, iconicity, status symbols, and ‘tween’ culture. A volume documenting the South Station Hoard project was published by punctum books in December of 2014. Before we get to the mechanics of the South Station Hoard, let me introduce the project’s constructers, crafters, imaginers, and researchers. Dynamic collaboration was key from the beginning. There was always a spark of excitement as we began our conversations. Here is our cast of characters, introduced by name, trade, and a brief account of their role, in their own words: Karie Edwards, photographer and 20-year Navy veteran: My role in this project was to visualize and construct a subterranean archeological site. We compiled a hoard of objects that tween girls would want to own, covet, or steal. These items needed to have an overtly religious meaning, have a shiny/‘blingy’ appeal, evoke a feeling of power and value, and most importantly, show social status. Courtney Weida, arts educator and ceramic artist: I crafted an essay/chapter with Carlee and Karie exploring the visual and material culture of the hoard in the context of girlhood/gender studies. I also had a wonderful time exploring a lesson related to treasure and community and personal histories. Debra Lustig, graduate student, University of Toronto: I was invited to join the project after I described my desire to look into early medieval metalwork and warrior culture. […] My role was to analyze what the objects found in the Staffordshire Hoard reflected about the identity of early medieval warriors both as individuals and as members of a very turbulent society. We used this as a kind of background context for the South Station Hoard, a fictitious archaeological find that mirrored the bullying behavior of medieval warriors. Katie Sickman, graphic designer: I actually came into the project well after its conception and near the end of its development. A lot of the work had been done already. I knew Karie as a fellow graduate student, and we had already teamed up once (along with 422
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another graduate student) to work on a cookbook featuring historic recipes we discovered in Virginia Tech’s archives. It was for a History of Books class taught by Carlee. I think that laid the groundwork for bringing me into the South Station Hoard later on. So even though the project was already pretty advanced when I got involved, our chemistry working together helped bring me up to speed quickly. David Rhea, then a graphic designer with a penchant for medieval reenacting, also joined our collaboration. And finally yours truly, Carlee Bradbury, art historian and medievalist. Our collaboration involved working and learning together but also challenging ourselves to question the boundaries of our disciplines. I remember thinking ‘I’m feeling creative. This can’t be right.’ As our project was forming in early 2012, so too was the Material Collective. I read their manifesto and blog posts from what seemed like my faraway outpost in Appalachia, and I felt hope. Watching the video of the Collective as they read/performed their Manifesto in May of that year at Kalamazoo gave me chills and somehow allowed me to find joy within Art History again. As I thought about the Staffordshire Hoard, I was also reading news accounts of the terrible effects of bullying on young girls, so I created a narrative centering on a hoard. I imagined objects that were stashed away in a locker in Boston’s South Station by a group of tween girls in 2012 and then found by a group of archaeologists in the year 2812 (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4). It was a hoard that comprised the trappings of twenty-first century tween girl culture: cell phones decorated with hot pink crystals, necklaces with twinkling pendants, personalized/defaced dolls, and religious objects. As the fictional future archaeologists studied the objects, the greater context of bullying emerged: the hoarded objects were stolen from one group of tween girls by another group. This project suggested reconceptualization of treasure, the acts of hoarding and archiving, and visual cultures of both tween girls and medieval warriors. By comparing the discovery and reception of our new, imaginary find with that of the Staffordshire Hoard, we raised issues regarding the acceptability and understanding of historical violence. Bloodshed and intense physicality marked the medieval warrior’s existence. Weaponry was not just a medieval necessity but also a status symbol. Young girls can impose just as much meaning on their specific visual culture; being bullied can be just as devastating. Tween girlhood can be a tenuous time filled with both excitement and uncertainty about one’s future and identity. Edwards, Weida, and I had vested interests in the fictional South Station tweens because of our own roles (at the time we began hoarding) as mothers of a tween girl, toddler daughter, and third-
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Figure 1: South Station Locker Bank, from the South Station Hoard project. Photo: K. Edwards.
trimester female baby. For me, working on this project was a way to deal with my own anxiety about my daughter’s future safety. With the surge in school violence in the last two decades, bullying tactics are becoming increasingly physical and resulting in more arrests of young girls (Brown et al. 2007, 1251). But bullying is often psychological, as well as physical: using shame as a weapon, girls can isolate and humiliate their victims (Fast, 2016, 8–10). When I was thinking through the narrative of the South Station Hoard, I wanted to highlight the future archaeologist’s apprehension in discovering the true nature of the find. When the violent nature of the Staffordshire Hoard was revealed, I felt a sense of dread – while it is certainly a cultural treasure of great aesthetic value, we cannot ignore the bloodshed of the battlefield or the purposeful destruction of the objects. I wanted the South Station Hoard archaeologists to feel a similar horror. As the project developed, it became apparent that each of our contributions – words, images, design – could be a stand-alone piece, but in working together we created a hoard of our own. In addition to gathering our objects, we collected different writing styles, color choices, tones of voice, even levels of personal engagement with the objects. Edwards was the main object collector and defacer, and she also staged the archaeological scene in her basement. She writes, ‘It was very difficult to make the subterranean site look authentic. I used 424
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Figure 2: Archaeologists excavating the locker, from the South Station Hoard project. Photo: K. Edwards.
a plastic brick wall covering, and the lights were shining off it, so it looked plastic. I had to choose the right angle to photograph, so it didn’t highlight the wall.’ Working from New York, Weida researched girlhood studies and created Pinterest boards and blogs. Rhea asked his tween girl cousins to decorate his old cell phones at a family reunion in Tennessee. Our hoard of objects exists now in a box in Edwards’ basement in Christiansburg, Virginia. Spiders have made homes in it, lending it the sense of time past we had always imagined. Making public a project in which we had hoarded much of our disciplinary anxiety was nerve-wracking, but also exhilarating. Karie Edwards, Courtney Weida, and I presented our initial work at the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group: cruising the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university at Northeastern University in Boston in 2012. Our small collaborative was welcomed into sessions organized by the kindred Material Collective. But after our presentation we felt a bit lost. Was it over? We talked about how we did not want the project to end. We wanted to do more research, ask more questions, and make more connections between art history, the teaching of art, and the studio work of an artist. We decided to write a book (Figure 5). 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960
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Figure 3: Embellished phones covered with dust, from the South Station Hoard project. Photo: K. Edwards.
Figure 4: ‘Study Image’ of cleaned phones, from the South Station Hoard project. Photo: K. Edwards.
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Figure 5: The South Station Hoard book cover. Photo: K. Edwards.
From these early discussions, I knew that I wanted our volume to confront the form of the traditional collection of scholarly essays with the intense visuality of an artist’s book. The photographs and graphic design of our volume were just as important as the content of the essays themselves. The book depended on the fruitful collisions between researching the original Hoard, investigating girlhood cultures, and crafting and curating a new hoard. We even intentionally varied our writing voice, from the academic to the narrative to the essayistic. I asked Katie Sickman to reflect on her choices and processes in designing the book. She writes: My main role was translating what the other project members had already envisioned throughout their research/writing into viable graphic form. I needed to listen to them discuss various aspects of the project, read the chapters, look through the images, and even do a little research on my own to catch myself up. With this project it was incredibly important for me to connect to the work and then delve into its own character and personality. And of course, finding a way to communicate that visually. From listening to the other project collaborators I could see they each had this intrinsic 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960
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sense of what the book should be and look like, but had nothing in tangible form yet. So for me, it was about designing a brand or identity for the project that captured the spirit of the project as a whole but also highlighted its unique components. Because I got involved late in the game, my biggest challenge was in understanding the project inside and out. It was just so unusual and more than simply a book; I had to connect to the content to do it justice. Not being there from the conception put me a little behind, and it did take some time for me to find a foothold. I went through several drafts in the beginning before finally creating something that not only worked, but truly captured the essence of the project. I remember going to meet Karie and Carlee to show them the draft that became the framework for the entire project, and I knew it was ‘the one’ before even revealing it. Once they saw it, it was an instant, ‘Ok, this is it’ vibe. We shared it with the other members and everyone was immediately on board to push forward. Another challenge was that the various materials and chapters were widely varied in tone and perspective. So from a design standpoint it was crucial to find a way to unite everything visually. The visual organization had to correlate to the creativity behind the project. The academic/researched parts were a little more formal in composition and layout, whereas the fictional journal entries and Karie’s and my chapters were about the artistic perspectives involved, so they were more freeform and expressive. The whole thing was more than a scholarly endeavor; it became an artist’s book. I cannot emphasize enough how challenging this project was in that it incorporated so much varied content. And it was essential to cultivate a design to not only organize the materials but also to elevate them into a unified whole, to blend the voices together but still preserve their identity. The visual tone was just as important as the written tone. So much of the project was visual even without the book format: the design and layout had to maintain that emphasis. The design impacts how our audience relates to the work. As with all graphic design, no matter how big or small the project, the identity and character of the content has to balance the functionality and aesthetic organization. The form should develop out of the content. No standard book layout or template could have worked here. Cultivating these individual solutions has been a focus in all my design work and is the subject of my recent thesis work: Tools vs Templates: A Commentary on Modern Graphic Design Ethics and Advancing Technologies. The South Station Hoard embodied every aspect of this design ideology.
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The publication of the book was a milestone. As we worked toward the book, Courtney Weida pushed our initial ideas further into her own work as an artist and arts educator. She writes: As we began work on our South Station Hoard, one of our earliest explorations was a conference presentation to concretize some of our ideas. Drawing from our drafts and designs in progress, I gave a talk at MIT’s Media In Transition Conference on May 4, 2013 (http://web.mit. edu/comm-forum/mit8/index.html). The conference topic, ‘Public Media, Private Media,’ had a great deal of overlap with our examinations of a personal collection of girls’ belongings that would become public knowledge/property when discovered by archaeologists. Conversations at the conference encouraged me to think more broadly about digital possibilities of hoarding, imagining ways in which the tween hoarders might discuss their hoarding through tweets, blog posts, emails, texts, Pinterest boards, and other digital data to form an archive. While crafting our fictitious hoard and drafting our article for Visual Culture and Gender (Weida et al. 2013), my treasure-lust was still not quite sated. Working with once-hoarded but oft-forgotten and broken fragments of jewelry from a treasure trove of my childhood in my mother’s basement, I decided to create a sort of bricolage quilt. This project took the form of a brassiere because my Adelphi University graphic design colleague, Dale Flashner, had asked me to create a sculptural brassiere for her Creative Cups auction, which raises awareness and funding for Breast Cancer research; the bra was also selected for the Spring 2013 juried exhibition at Adelphi, and it was featured in local news coverage (‘Art of the Bra’). I thought a great deal about training bras, and the transitional developmental point between childhood and adolescence in terms of girl culture and jewel(ry) items treasured by pre-teens. It felt like a natural link for the hoard, artwork, and publications my colleagues and I had been creating around these provocative topics, inspired by feminist research and education. The trappings of tweenhood may include sincere talismans alongside tongue-in-cheek props, like crucifixes alongside glittery pink gems, silver dragons, shimmery stars. Tweens know these jewels are not real engagement rings and Hope Diamonds, but enjoy the reference as a sort of poking fun. There are many parodies, caricatures, symbols, reflections, and idea(l)s associated with these objects to explore, particularly as rites of passage that mirror objects like training bras. I enjoyed stitching beads, baubles, pendants, keys, and other bits of jewelry onto the bra with black thread that looked jagged, almost like stitches. The act of sewing felt ancient and spell-like, whereas the objects themselves were shiny and new looking.
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The next step was the Fall 2013 publication from our summer work in the Journal of Visual Culture and Gender (Weida et al. 2013). Examining the hoard from the perspective of a feminist art educator, I worked with Bradbury and Edwards to create and document both the hoard and our creative and analytical processes in the context of girlhood studies and visual culture. On a personal note, by the time this article was published, I was expecting my daughter and creating a personal hoard of her layette which was graciously shared by Carlee, whose daughter was then a toddler. From these words, from my memories and from those of all my collaborators, it should be clear how committed we all remain to this project. It was my hope in hoarding together all of my collaborator’s comments that perhaps our project could serve as a model, maybe an inspiration for other discipline-merging collaborations, collectives, and creations.
About the Author Carlee A. Bradbury is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Radford University, Radford, VA (E-mail:
[email protected]).
References Art of the Bra Gets Extra Support at Creative Cups 2013 Exhibition. 2013. YouTube video, from MyLongIslandTV.com, published by ‘MyLITV,’ 16 April, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cqXk4KZEMrA. Brown, L.M., M. Chesney-Lind and N. Stein. 2007. Patriarchy Matters: Toward a Gendered Theory of Teen Violence and Victimization. Violence Against Women 13: 1249–1273, doi: 10.1177/1077801207310430. Fast, J. 2016. Beyond Bullying: Breaking the Cycle of Shame, Bullying, and Violence. New York: Oxford University Press. Weida, C.L., C.A. Bradbury and K. Edwards. 2013. Guerrilla Girlhood Glitter Guild: Researching Hidden Hoards of Tween Treasure. Visual Culture and Gender 8: 7–20, http://vcg.emitto.net.
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